Wallace’s Insect Collection Found!

The owner wanted a sum that far exceeded Mr. Heggestad’s budget — a colossal $600. “I was just out of law school, I had no money and no business buying it,” he said. But the owner was willing to take installments of $100 a month, and into Mr. Heggestad’s possession fell an incomparable scientific treasure.

The cabinet belonged to Alfred Russel Wallace, the English naturalist who conceived the idea of evolution through natural selection independently of Charles Darwin.